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    The Fertile Crescent
    The Fertile Crescent
    The Fertile Crescent
    Ebook69 pages21 minutes

    The Fertile Crescent

    By Karen Shenfeld

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    About this ebook

    Ancient and medieval Jewish travelers are brought to poetic life amidst images garnered from the poet's personal journeys crossing the Sahara Desert and voyaging down the Congo River. This title is number 135 of the Essential Poets Series. {Guernica Editions}
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGuernica
    Release dateJan 1, 2005
    ISBN9781550714609
    The Fertile Crescent
    Author

    Karen Shenfeld

    Karen Shenfeld has published three books with Guernica Editions: The Law of Return (1999), which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry in 2001, The Fertile Crescent (2005), and My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish (2010). Her poetry has also appeared in well-known journals and anthologies published in Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Bangladesh. It has been featured on Canada’s CBC Radio and CKLN, and on 39 Dover Street, a short-wave radio programme produced on the Isle of Wight, England. She has been awarded Canada, Ontario and Toronto Arts Council Grants. In March of 2010, she travelled to Linares, Mexico to participate in the first Festival Internacional de Literatura. Shenfeld has also brought her poetic sensibility to the writing of feature magazine stories, for publications such as Saturday Night and The Idler, and to documentary filmmaking. Her personal documentary, Il Giardino, The Gardens of Little Italy, was screened at the 2007 Planet in Focus Environmental Film & Video Festival. Shenfeld lives in the heart of Toronto’s Little Italy. In the writing of My Father’s Hands Spoke in Yiddish, the poet flies home from far-flung lands to explore the re-imagined terrain of Bathurst Manor, the Toronto suburb in which she was raised.

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      Book preview

      The Fertile Crescent - Karen Shenfeld

      KAREN SHENFELD

      THE FERTILE CRESCENT

       ESSENTIAL POETS SERIES 135

      GUERNICA

      Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.) 2005

      Contents

      Sarah’s Song

      Go to the Land I Will Show Thee

      They Praised Her to Pharaoh

      Take Thou Thy Son

      The Jar

      The Tent

      Girls at the Well, Laughing

      Woman at the River, Washing

      Hammam 

      Doubt

      Thirst

      Sahara 

      The Track 

      The Lamp Carpet

      The Bargain

      Were You To Close Your Eyes

      Houseboat

      The Jade Sea

      Everything You Wanted to Know 

      Only Now Can I Tell You. 

      If I Ran From You

      Towards Gorapani

      Gorapani

      Descent to Tatopani 

      Monastery 

      Pony Train 

      The Donkeys of Lamu

      Stargazing in Morelia

      Scorpions Nest in Niches

      The Day Oren Almost Got Stung by a Scorpion

      Purepecha Woman Combing Her Hair

      Doing Time with Grandfather Afrika

      Acknowledgements

      FOR MY PARENTS,

      LOU AND PEGGY SHENFELD

      Sarah’s Song

      As his knife’s blade scores the fruit’s

      vermiculate skin, releasing perfume

      in tender lines of longitude; as

      his fingers peel back crescent moons,

      exposing an inner skin

      through which shines the bright flesh;

      as he separates each section, which, 

      for no reason, holds the shape

      of a child’s small ear; as he spits

      pale seeds to the ground where, undisturbed,

      they shrivel and dry,

      my days grow longer, more barren.

      Go to the Land I Will Show Thee

      1

      In the middle of my days,

      I heeded God’s silent word, striking out 

      from the merchants’ circus of Haran,

      to trace this green lunar arc, 

      more imagined than real.

      With all my substance and all my souls, 

      I came down to a

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